Dungeon Days

Dungeon Days

Remember the days when you fell in love with punk rock as a youngster and joined the mosh pit night in, night out? 'Member when all your friends grew up and abandoned punk rock as just a phase in their lives as they moved on, while you had long identified enough with the genre to make it a permanent part of your now young adult life? 'Member digging deeper and deeper to find your exact niché within an already niché genre, discovering dozens upon dozens of tiny bands with a basement size following that fit exactly that mold? Eventually, you came to regret never starting a band and living the dream...all of which could be an extract from yours truly's personal diary.

For Dungeon Days, a Copenhagen, Denmark based punk rock outfit, that's exactly what it is, minus the last part. They actually started that band. As such, their self-titled debut album is a charming attempt at channeling a decade's worth of punk rock influence into an album to an extent where they literally explain things as they are on "Blood & Mixtapes": "We weren't born into it. We're just some kids who heard a mixtape back in 1998, we kind of grew up with it. We wanna taste some blood before we get too old or it's all too late". This is a three-piece who literally decided it was time to put your money where your mouth is, and the result is a raw punk rock album that channels mid-90s NOFX alongside the posi-attitude of bands like Good Clean Fun in the process.

While the naked truth is that majority of the songs on "Dungeon Days" are fairly average punk rock songs - not ones that will make you raise an eyebrow or recommend Dungeon Days to your friends as the hottest new thing - there are a couple of bangers on the record. "Copenfornia", for instance, starts with solid mid 90s punk riffs and has a catchy skate punk chorus with gnarly vocals. "Bandshirts", despite its slightly forced nature as the 'song about a woman', is a sweet song about lead singer Anders Grølsted's wife with lines like "but when I saw that we both had the same shirt, I knew you were more than just a lucky summer flirt. and "I might not fuck my way through the world but I ended up with the best girl in the whole fucking world. The universe, the galaxy, a parallel dimension, through different times, and different lives".

It does take a little while to get used to Grølsted's snarly vocals, but then again Fat Mike wasn't much better in his early days (just listen to, say, "Maximum Rocknroll" by NOFX). The instrumentals are like straight out of the band's early days with a few Blink 182 references in the process, and lyrically, the album is literally written for someone in their late 20s / early 30s struggling with not getting involved earlier. That alone has some value. It's a good start with a surprisingly clean production, but the songwriting will need to improve quite a bit before they escape the confines of the local Copenhagen scene.